Cal Hooper Books in Order

The Cal Hooper books form a rural trilogy set in and around the fictional village of Ardnakelty in western Ireland, following a retired Chicago police officer who comes looking for quiet and instead finds himself bound up in local feuds.

The Searcher introduces Cal as he buys a rundown cottage, learns the rhythms of the countryside, and meets Trey Reddy, a guarded twelve year old who asks him to investigate her missing brother Brendan. His search pulls him into the village's secrets and forces him to decide what justice looks like when he no longer wears a badge.

In The Hunter, set a few years later, Trey is a teenager apprenticed to Cal in carpentry when her long absent father Johnny returns with a smooth talking Englishman and a scheme to hunt for gold in the local river. As greed and old grudges ignite, Cal's uneasy place in the community and his loyalty to Trey are tested in ways that have little to do with formal law.

The Keeper closes the arc when well liked local woman Rachel Holohan disappears on a freezing night and is found dead in the river, a death that splits Ardnakelty into hostile camps. Cal owes loyalty to neighbors who helped him settle, but his fiancee Lena wants no part of the village's deep rooted feuds, and investigating Rachel's life uncovers a scheme that could tear the townland apart.

Across the trilogy, French focuses less on procedural detail and more on conversations in pubs, farmyards, and kitchens, where people bargain over land, money, and reputation. Cal's friendship with Trey, his relationship with Lena, and his wary respect for neighbor Mart Lavin give the books a strong emotional throughline.

The result is a quieter, more rural kind of crime novel that still offers plenty of suspense, especially as outsiders and locals clash over who gets to decide what counts as a crime and what can be handled within the community.

Because those relationships shift and deepen from book to book, the Cal Hooper stories work best read in order, starting with The Searcher and continuing through The Hunter and The Keeper.